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The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville · short story collection, 1856·6 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • He built a piazza facing a mountain he'd never climbed. Melville's narrator regrets his farmhouse has no piazza, builds one to "feast upon the view" of Mount Greylock, then rows across to a distant house he spots from it. There he finds Marianna, a lonely woman who says she dreams of "yonder house" without knowing it's his.
  • Bartleby refuses every task with the same four words. Asked to check copy, run an errand, or eventually just leave the office, the scrivener answers "I would prefer not to" at least a dozen times. The narrator-lawyer, a self-described "eminently safe man," never manages to make him do otherwise.
  • The ship's figurehead turns out to be a human skeleton. When the canvas shroud rips away, Captain Delano sees "death for the figure-head, in a human skeleton," chalked beneath it with the words "Follow your leader." It is the murdered Don Aranda, and the reveal exposes the slave revolt Delano had failed to read for the entire story.
  • A traveling salesman pitches lightning rods during a thunderstorm. He charges "only twenty dollars, sir, a dollar a foot" while warning the narrator he could become "a heap of charred offal." The narrator seizes the rod, snaps it, and throws the man out: "I seized it; I snapped it; I dashed it; I trod it."
  • A tortoise becomes the collection's clearest moral image. Melville writes that "the tortoise is both black and bright," urging the reader to "enjoy the bright" without denying "the dark side." It is his answer to the volcanic, waterless Encantadas themselves, beautiful and ruinous at once.
  • The bell-maker is killed by the machine he built in secret. Magistrates break down the tower door and find Bannadonna "prostrate and bleeding" at the feet of his own bronze statue, struck down by the mechanical figure he had built, unsanctioned, to ring the bell for him.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it holds two of the most anthologized American short stories ever written, Bartleby and Benito Cereno, alongside four more that share their obsession with authority that turns out to be an illusion.

Six stories bound by one nerve: a scrivener who stops complying, a slave ship whose captain isn't the one in charge, and a bell-maker crushed by the machine he built to replace him.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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